Price of a Double Life

I am reluctantly succumbing to the charms of the British television presenter Jeremy Clarkson. For years I resisted: I had no interest in Top Gear, his high-octane programme for dim-wit motorists. I liked neither his in-your-face screen personality nor his studiously non-PC newspaper columns. Added to that, I had to suffer the ignominy of having my partner, who is normally quite discerning, make a point of regularly watching him and telling me that she found him funny.

My prejudice began to lift in mid-2007 when, with quiet authority, Clarkson presented something very different – a riveting historical documentary about the British raid on the German-occupied port of St Nazaire in March 1942. His film told how a group of commandos sailed into the mouth of the River Loire and sabotaged a heavily fortified dry dock which posed a grave threat to beleaguered Allied convoys in the Atlantic. Most participants were either killed or captured. Among the latter was an army captain, Michael Burn, who was removed to Colditz. The programme featured him as one of the few current survivors. It also showed chilling footage of him being marched at gun-point past the Campbeltown, the British destroyer which, after ramming the dry dock, remained embedded there, full of explosives ready to go off at any moment. Unable to betray any hint of imminent danger, Burn had to act as if all was normal. He even managed to flash a nonchalant V (for Victory) sign at the German film unit. I was fascinated to see his battle-weary features, as I had recently met him after enjoying his autobiography Turned towards the Sun. Somehow news of my enthusiasm reached his literary agent who invited us both to dinner. Belying his ninety odd years, Burn bounded into the room with the energy of a man half his age and put the other guests to shame with the sharpness of his mental recall. You don’t often come across a former war hero who was also a lover of the Soviet spy Guy Burgess, and it is because the book is full of such delightful incongruities that it works so well. On one level it is a traditional English memoir, written on more or less chronological lines. Coursing through its well-honed sentences, however, is the life-blood of an extraordinary personal odyssey, told in a manner by turns witty, inquisitive and subversive, which culminates in the unfolding of a passionate love story between Burn, who is basically gay, and Mary Booker, a beautiful older woman. Along the way he encounters a host of colourful characters. And this underscores the book’s particular interest to me. As a professional dissector of lives, I latch on to autobiographies either for telling firsthand descriptions of historical figures and events or, more subtly, for insights into what was really going on in a particular era. This book scores on both counts. It will be read by future toilers in my trade not just for its off-beat portraits of well-known personalities but also for its informed guide to Britain’s moral climate during the first half of the twentieth century when homosexuals such as Burn had to work hard to cover their tracks. The roots of his story are found in an upper middle-class English family circa 1920. I know of no other autobiography which captures this buttoned-up world so precisely and wittily. Burn’s father was a City solicitor who gained a coveted knighthood for looking after the affairs of the Duchy of Cornwall. Dressed always in black coat and striped trousers, with a pearl pin in his tie, he had strong convictions (Baldwin was ‘sound’, Churchill not) and an obsession with socially correct behaviour (he once upbraided his son for pronouncing the Pytchley Hunt as ‘Pitchley’). Only one school – Winchester – was countenanced. ‘Reference to Harrow . . . was excluded from my father’s vocabulary, as if that too was a disease,’ writes Burn. His mother’s family owned property in Le Touquet, where Burn enjoyed visiting another local resident, Somerset Maugham’s ex-wife, Syrie. But his parents considered this sociable interior decorator to be part of the demi-monde. Asked once who was staying there, Burn heard his father retort at the mention of certain obvious homosexuals, ‘One of those’. When he came to Cecil Beaton, he was told, ‘If that man comes in, you must leave the room.’ Burn’s ambition to train as a journalist was unlikely to be encouraged in this frosty environment. But his subsequent career does add significantly to one of the book’s strengths – its sense of providing a parallel version of the twentieth century. If reporting is the first draft of history, autobiography can offer a suitably edited version. Before joining The Times, Burn wanted to discover more about Germany, where Hitler had recently taken power. Armed with an introduction to Unity Mitford, he penetrated the Führer’s inner circle and was seduced by National Socialism’s efforts to solve unemployment. A lesser man might have skated over this indiscretion. But Burn recalls every painful detail, even his observation that unsocial members of the community might benefit from a spell in Dachau. He notes Goering’s patronizing description of Unity and her sister Diana as perfect German beauties, and adds his own gloss: ‘Tall, flaxen-haired and cornflower-eyed, their faces perfectly rounded exhausts to a bland superiority, they strolled through the lounges of the privileged hotels like a pair of off-duty caryatids.’ Once on The Times Burn observed at close hand his editor Geoffrey Dawson’s machinations over King Edward VIII’s abdication and appeasement of Hitler. His accounts of joining the commandos, fighting at St Nazaire, and incarceration in Colditz could hardly fail. They are classics of war narrative, and all the better for being compressed into two chapters. Burn’s skill as a reporter is often most evident in less familiar places. Denied a visa for Moscow, he went to Budapest as The Times correspondent for three crucial years in the late 1940s. Newly married to Mary Booker and sympathetic to Communism, he witnessed the painful destruction of Hungary’s post-war hopes, as pro-Soviet thugs wrested control of the state from politicians not so different from the British Labour party. Running through the book is the thread of his homosexuality – and the compromises he was forced to make on this account. Not much new there, you might think. But Burn’s recollections manage to be both amusing and candid about the confusions that arose from finding himself on the wrong side of the law. During a promiscuous phase in the 1930s, he read a newspaper report of a police case against a male brothel. He was concerned because this brought home the dangers of pursuing his own sexual preferences. So, being upright and rather innocent, he decided to talk to someone at Scotland Yard. Since a rule in his family had always been, ‘Go to the top’, he was rewarded with an interview with a surprisingly sympathetic senior police officer who, rather than lambasting him, assured him he would one day find a woman. When, however, Burn told his sometime lover Guy Burgess, the louche traitor was rendered momentarily (and unusually) speechless, until, recovering his composure, he could only say, ‘How very objective, Micky.’ Burn’s marriage in 1947 had little effect on his sexual behaviour. He refrained from taking male lovers in Hungary (he admits this would have been foolish, even if he had been single). Once back in London, however, he returned to cruising in Hyde Park, albeit after arranging for his wife to be out of town. His deceitfulness threatened to be exposed when he was caught in flagrante in a Paddington hotel by two men who claimed to be policemen. It was soon clear they were nothing of the sort – merely blackmailers demanding £75 for their silence. At this stage Burn showed his mettle, courting prosecution by informing the police. On the advice of friends, however, he still refrained from telling Mary. When his two assailants were arrested and brought to trial, he again dispatched her to the countryside. Despite fears that his name would emerge, he stood firm. But even after winning his case, albeit under a cloak of anonymity, he was enjoined by his psychiatrist to keep Mary in the dark and so was forced to continue ‘the old hateful need to conceal and lie’. Eventually, he told her all. Her reaction was surprising to him but predictable to the knowing reader: ‘Darling, how awful to have gone through all of that alone.’ He did not give up his boyfriends, whom he occasionally brought home. He realized his wife understood what was going on, but, for all his physical courage, he felt unable to discuss it. His attitude recalls St Augustine’s, ‘Make me heterosexual, but not yet.’ As with this North African saint, whose Confessions are arguably the first autobiography, Burn’s change of heart had a spiritual dimension. Mary was no prude, but she was a committed Roman Catholic, whom he correctly guessed would feel a particular joy if their original registry office wedding was followed with a Christian ceremony in a church. (This became possible in canon law terms after the death of her first husband.) But Burn only allowed himself to take confession and communion after ending a protracted affair with a male lover. Once he made this religious commitment, it had a profound effect. From that date (1963) until Mary’s painful death from cancer in 1974, he slept with no one else, and he only reverted to gayness five years after her passing. While she was alive, Burn wallowed in unusual uxoriousness. He writes adoringly of a ‘life-giving’ woman who introduced him to rural life in North Wales. Before meeting him, she had enjoyed a brief affair with the courageous Battle of Britain pilot Richard Hillary, author of The Last Enemy. After her death Burn edited her love letters with Hillary which became a best-seller. He also wrote a typically wide range of books on his own account, from Full Throttle, a youthful history of motor-racing at Brooklands, through several didactic novels, to Mr Lyward’s Answer, a passionate non-fiction study of a therapeutic community where he spent eighteen months as a member of staff. (He remarks wryly and doubtless correctly that this became required reading for psychiatric social workers.) He also wrote old-fashioned plays, including The Night of the Ball which, despite a critical mauling from Kenneth Tynan, ran for three months in the West End. His forte, however, was and is his poetry, which is seen to great effect in his collection Poems as Accompaniment to a Life (2006). His aptitude for the quiet metaphor is highlighted in the verse form, which also allows him to show off his lightly-worn classical education and Christianized spirituality. For all the poems’ directness, however, they never surpass the beguiling prose of Turned towards the Sun, a title which reflects Burn’s warm, enquiring nature. His feat in having rendered external events and personal tribulations into such a seamless narrative is remarkable. After our meeting Burn invited me to the Welsh cottage he once shared with Mary. It remains a shrine to her and their life together. In conversation he frequently returned to her and to mutual friends such as Bertrand Russell who lived across the valley. Never one to stand still, he is working on a new novel while immersing himself in his latest romance – environmental politics. Only when I left did I grasp perhaps the most significant theme of his autobiography. It is a meditation on a very British subject – the nagging fault-line in the national psyche between passion and reserve, between revelation and concealment. Pinter would have written it differently, but Burn has done it just right.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 24 © Andrew Lycett 2009